Tropical attraction
This is an excerpt from an article in Sanctuary magazine issue 5.
Remember camping holidays when you were a kid? They were all about living outdoors and not wearing shoes—for weeks! It’s a pity that in adult life many of us have lost touch with the simple pleasure of living outdoors. Instead, we’ve cosseted ourselves in nests of airconditioned solid brick.
Troppo Architects has spent the last 28 years creating houses that celebrate, rather than spurn, the outdoors. Their buildings, found mostly in regional or remote areas of Australia, are devoted to the notion of living in and with the environment. And, unlike the family tent from those early camping trips, Troppo’s intelligent and responsive houses are designed to make tropical living not only comfortable, but fun too.
One of their recent creations—the Wallaby Way House—is hidden away in a pine forest on Magnetic Island, an idyllic droplet of land just off the coast of Far North Queensland, near Townsville. Apart from stunning natural views, the house is also privy to cooling tropical sea breezes and dramatic downpours. With this in mind, the architect has designed the house as a permeable, flexible pavilion with extensive veranda spaces protected from the elements by wide overhangs. The idea is to allow the occupants to enjoy the outdoors while remaining sheltered from its excesses.
“Only about 20 per cent of the external walls of the house are actual walls,” says Troppo architect Zammi Rohan. “The rest is windows, doors, louvres, shutters, timber batten breezeways and insect screens.”
During its years designing houses for tropical climates, Troppo Architects has built up a collective knowledge about shelter while respecting and celebrating the peculiarities of environment, climate and place. The firm’s philosophy is to provide flexible living choices, and the Wallaby Way House epitomises this. “It’s the embodiment of our understanding of what it’s like to live in the tropics,” says Zammi.
Troppo worked closely with owner Norm Brice on this project. Norm runs his own engineering company, so from the outset the project was very much a team effort. “The project was a bit of an ego trip,” he admits. “The expansion of Townsville has seen domestic construction follow Sydney and Melbourne trends, which I felt were inappropriate for the tropics. My goal, working with Troppo Architects, was to build the ultimate tropical living house.”
The house is designed to be flexible and to allow the occupants to control the quality of a space, not merely rack up a list of “must-haves” that constitute some arbitrary notion of comfortable living. “Temperature, humidity, shade, light, colour, breeze, scent, texture, sound; a myriad of attributes determine our feelings for a space and how we live in that space on an hour by hour, or even minute by minute, basis,” says Zammi.
